alt Hacker NewsI had a Roomba about 10 years ago. It was OK but required a lot of “handholding” to not run over cords, kids toys, etc. It just was not really worth it to use it in an environment where you can’t keep everything nailed down and off the floor at all times. Relocated it to a basement level where we had much more empty but sill finished space. The cat angrily pooped just outside her litter box and the Roomba ran right over it and shredded them turds all over the floor. Since then it has lived in my mind as the dumbest smart product.
The real problem for me has been that I want something to straighten out my living spaces, not to vacuum the floors. Vacuuming is quick and a good vacuum cleaner (old school bagged kind, not a silly filter one), will do a far better job than a little battery powered gizmo anyways. But a robot capable of picking up the toys my kids like to leave out, or bringing abandoned coffee mugs to the sink (can you tell I live with multiple adults and children?) would be worth quite a bit to me. A robot capable of washing my dishes and putting away my laundry would be worth more. One capable of preparing meals would be worth more to me than a car.
Of course they would have to be 100% open source with easily replaceable and repairable components, which is where I think most of these types of projects go wrong. I remember seeing the Chefee demo and it was very cool but the main problem is that you aren’t buying a product, you are investing in the idea that the company behind it won’t go belly up in two years and brick your $60,000 chef/cabinet/fridge thing and that it won’t sell itself to e.g. Google which will cram it full of ads and spyware.
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A robot capable of preparing meals also has a similar hazard matrix to a car.
Absolutely no way I'm having something cloud-connected - with human-body level degrees of freedom and the actuator strength to pick up a knife and chop a carrot - or anything else it might want to chop - in the house.
Plus, anything that smart is connected by definition. It doesn't need wi-fi, it's got eyes. Open-source-ness is somewhat moot when we're talking about intelligence models at the scale needed to make something like that viable, at least on current tech.
A better solution to laundry? That I would buy. Not even putting it away, if you could throw stuff in at the top and have a drawer at the bottom where it emerges, ironed, folded and sorted, that would be 95% of the problem solved.
I was agreeing with you on all accounts but seriously doubt they’ll be open source. I think the average person will barely clock this as mattering, and will pay up. The market has shown time and again that consumers prefer highly integrated environments that work seamlessly vs open source, especially for hardware.
I also agree it’d be worth more to me than my car, and I’d hope much like modern cars such an expensive consumer purchase will end up with similar warranty protections and eventually a third party market for replacement parts.
Much like cars, I’m guessing it’ll be a better idea to go with a large company that’ll be able to honor that warranty without being financially ruined. The first few generations will see lots of experimentation and thus be more risky for the consumer before the market settles out with a few big winners (as is often the case).
The big thing for me was that hauling out a canister vac was just a big PITA. But I concluded that a 10 minute job with a broom vac (Dyson) dealt with 80% of the headache (and I had a monthly housekeeper anyway). A robovac just didn't really do anything for me and would have had various issue with cords or random stuff on the floor.
> will do a far better job than a little battery powered gizmo anyways.
Running my 1.2kW vacuum for <2 minutes is guaranteed to defeat the roomba from a work capacity standpoint. These products are fundamentally unserious to me.
> The cat angrily pooped just outside her litter box
This cracked me up, as it implies the cat had thoroughly planned her skirmish :)
i watched via camera 12 years ago roomba spreading my dogs diarrhea all over living room (thanks god to tile floors). I connected to camera first time in a months just few seconds before roomba took first swipe over the poop. Still remember feelings of paralysis, despair and lack of control.
Despite this i still used roomba everywhere I lived.
latest roomba model actually has "poop detection".
That's my experience as well. We got rid of our Roomba because you need to remove pretty much everything from the floor, only for it to spend 20 - 30 minutes vacuuming at incredible volume. Getting the 20 year old Miele vacuum from downstairs, vacuuming and putting it back takes 10 minutes, you just move stuff out the way as you go, and it clears better too.